How To: Allow Students to Choose Their Breakout Room in Zoom

Description

Breakout rooms allow students to work in small groups within Zoom. The instructions below will walk you through setting up breakout rooms that allow students to choose the room they would like to join. This feature can be used with traditional breakouts as well as pre-assigned breakouts.

On This Page

• Important Pre-Steps
• Allowing Students to Join Traditional Breakout Rooms
• Allowing Students to Join Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms
• Having Students Join a Breakout Room

Steps

Important Pre-Steps

Both the meeting host and participants must be using Zoom client version 5.3.0 or higher to use the self-assign breakout feature. To ensure your client meets the requirement, download the latest Zoom Client for Meetings.

Allowing Students to Join Traditional Breakout Rooms

In this instance, “Traditional Breakout Rooms” refers to breakouts that you have not set up in advance using Zoom’s pre-assigned breakout feature.

1. Click the Breakout Rooms button located in the Zoom toolbar
   
2. Set the number of rooms
3. Click Let participants choose room
4. Click Create
   
5. Click Open All Rooms
   

Allowing Students to Join Pre-assigned Breakout Rooms

If you have set up pre-assigned breakout rooms, you can still allow students to manually join breakout rooms themselves. This can be helpful if a student forgets to sign into https://duq.zoom.us prior to joining your meeting.

1. Click the Breakout Rooms button located in your Zoom toolbar
   
2. Select Options
3. Check the box for Allow Participants to Choose Room
4. Click Open All Rooms
   • a. Any students that signed in will be prompted to join their pre-assigned rooms.
   • b. Any students that did not sign-in will be able to join a room on their own, without being manually assigned, by following the instructions below.
     

Having Students Join a Breakout Room

Students will need to follow the steps below to join a breakout room after you have opened them.

1. Click the Breakout Rooms button located in the Zoom toolbar
   
2. Select Join a breakout room
3. Students should select Join next to the room name
   
4. Once in the breakout room, students can click the Breakout Rooms icon and then select Choose Breakout Room to join a different room